Unreal Engine Carnal Instinct [2024-10-17] [Team Carnal Instinct]

[Julie44]

i have never commented anything to any post here, but damn... this game its just so good, i played it jerking, but at each 5 minutes playing i need to stop and admire the grafics, or gameplay, ot content, or any surprising thing. congrats. totally reccomend. i downloaded to jerk off, and now i am admiring this art

 

[botaniq_1]

this game is so boring, how do you even play it. Every quest makes you run a thousand miles somewhere

 

[Abuzze]

Just tested it. So far this game has THE best 3d open-world hack-and-slash gameplay. People complain about having to run for miles, but I've done all the quests and never seen distances over 500-600metres MAXIMUM between objectives. Then there is fast travel etc.

However, when I tried to see what animations are available, there was only one for humanoid x humanoid female protag - the cowgirl position.

Is that it? Or do we eed to grind the carnal instinct points to unlock more?

 

[TheInternetIsForThis]

Just tested it. So far this game has THE best 3d open-world hack-and-slash gameplay. People complain about having to run for miles, but I've done all the quests and never seen distances over 500-600metres MAXIMUM between objectives. Then there is fast travel etc.

However, when I tried to see what animations are available, there was only one for humanoid x humanoid female protag - the cowgirl position.

Is that it? Or do we eed to grind the carnal instinct points to unlock more?

There's quite a few animations available in the older UE4 version, but the UE5 version is very limited at the moment, since it hasn't seen any content updates yet.

 

[Abuzze]

There's quite a few animations available in the older UE4 version, but the UE5 version is very limited at the moment, since it hasn't seen any content updates yet.

I'm playing the UE4 version 0.3.7.0. Is there a "change animation" button? Since no matter what kind of "Civilians" NPC the femProtag asks, it's always the cowgirl scene.

 

[TheInternetIsForThis]

I'm playing the UE4 version 0.3.7.0. Is there a "change animation" button? Since no matter what kind of "Civilians" NPC the femProtag asks, it's always the cowgirl scene.

Oh, the random NPCs will always have the same DSS scene. If you want a different scene, grab a different NPC. And there are only a couple of scenes for DSS to pick from. Most scenes in UE5 are with specific NPCs around the map rather than part of DSS.

 

[JustAl]

this game is so boring, how do you even play it. Every quest makes you run a thousand miles somewhere

Yeah, the UE5 version is more a proof of concept. The UE4 version has more content but stopped development in favor of the UE5 version. Really you can say Skyrim has the same problem but randomly spawning enemies and events are more common there. The devs of Carnal Instinct should consider more spontaneity in later builds.

A nice game but far from complete. Try it then wait a year.

 

[Abuzze]

Oh, the random NPCs will always have the same DSS scene. If you want a different scene, grab a different NPC. And there are only a couple of scenes for DSS to pick from. Most scenes in UE5 are with specific NPCs around the map rather than part of DSS.

Thank you. Is there a scene list available somewhere? Or any way to spawn different NPCs to see what's in the game in terms of sex scenes?

 

[Abuzze]

Thank you. Is there a scene list available somewhere? Or any way to spawn different NPCs to see what's in the game in terms of sex scenes?

Nevermind, found the scene list. Underwhelming. Not sure why devs add so little with top-notch assets that use the same body type and (likely) rigging.

 

[Hans Zuchter]

Try it then wait a year.

That's very optimistic.

 

[JustAl]

That's very optimistic.

It is, but I'm trying to cut down on my habit of complaining. The advice of "wait a year" is repeatable each year.

A few pages ago I noted the game currently doesn't have proper management for stat point changes, effectively making spells and potions that temporarily change stats along with permanent and semi-permanent abilities, perks, and additive increments prone to calculation errors. One has to acknowledge that copying a Bethesda Gamebryo engine game comes with the caveat of having to recreate its critical systems within your chosen engine where they likely do not exist. Bethesda has brought significant change to records and scripting with each update to their engine so it's no small feat to adapt abilities, perks, magic effects (including scripted effects), alchemy ingredients, Levelled Lists, activators, morality, disposition, dynamic scenes and AI, crime bounty, and more to Unreal Engine 5.

It's a more difficult problem figuring out dynamic scenes -- a point to why SexLab Skyrim mods are so popular is because they've grown to the level where a wide variety of animations can be played anywhere an actor is located with clean transitions without placing an animation object, whereas sex games in Unreal engine tend to snap all the actors to a sex animation object, hence black screen transitions and relocating actors to a specific place in the area.

That said, the UE5 engine rebase is in fact a good idea -- if you're going to be working towards such large systems over time you may as well pick an engine that will get community and developer support as your project grows. Otherwise staying on UE4 has the risk of discovering a hard problem and not getting community support for advice nor the benefit of reporting your needs to Epic with hope that they'll build a system to handle your mechanics. Plus if the official release is botched it's more likely secondary modders will help the game improve on the newer engine by the time it is released.

 

[krendelll]

Hey guys, tell someone, how is pregnancy implemented in the IE5 version? You conditionally say to the Naga - fertilize me (or after the sex scene) and it's done, then the character's stomach is rounded and after a while he just disappears and somewhere in the world there is an adult NPC or even worse - a line of text that can be sold on the slave market..? ))

 

[xossiplover485]

Going into an off-topic argument about UE5 is just begging for another swath of posts to vanish. Here's the short list and then you'll get nothing more from me on the UE5/UE4 thing:

• The devs spent a year working on the UE5 build before releasing the first version, just like they did with the original UE4 builds.
• Similar to the above, the UE5 build currently features about the same amount of content as the early UE4 builds, though it has far more in the way of mechanical features than the early UE4 builds had.
• Team Carnal was very public about the UE5 build and the switch for the whole time it was a work in progress. The first announcement for it happened a year before we got it, back in July or so of 2022.
• The developers opted to switch to UE5 for a variety of reasons, including UE5's development pipeline working better with their workflow and UE4 no longer receiving official support.
• There are multiple features in UE5 that never existed in UE4, including vehicles, mounts, and pregnancy.
• Every new build of this game has had a significant number of bugs, because team carnal isn't exactly the best about code logic and finding edge cases. That is true of both UE4 and UE5.
• The UE4 build's features and mechanics were by and large a demo/testing area where you could just find and use things. In UE5, much of the game's content is actually earned by doing things ingame. This includes things that were previously accessible from the start, like the transformation system.
• Currently the UE5 build has more explorable map than UE4 ever did, but it has fewer quests and very little in the way of sex scenes. The developers are in the process of fixing the latter by rolling out their dynamic sex system, but the current build does not have that yet.
• The region and NPCs from the UE4 build are things the devs plan to bring back, but that area was evidently intended to be accessible mid-game and so we're currently locked to an entirely different portion of the map at the moment.

so they are not updating in UE4
and updating in UE5

 

[panaeon]

so they are not updating in UE4
and updating in UE5

Yeah, it's a bit of a bummer - to basically reset the Game Development back to the Beginning of UE4 with that.

I hope it won't become a pattern with every new major Release of Unreal Engine though - because then the Game will never evolve past the point we know it in UE4 right now and will become like an "infinite Cash-Cow" - eating just as much cash to develop every new Unreal Engine Version to the point we already know...

 

[JustAl]

Yeah, it's a bit of a bummer - to basically reset the Game Development back to the Beginning of UE4 with that.

I hope it won't become a pattern with every new major Release of Unreal Engine though - because then the Game will never evolve past the point we know it in UE4 right now and will become like an "infinite Cash-Cow" - eating just as much cash to develop every new Unreal Engine Version to the point we already know...

The ghost of Duke Nukem Forever lives on. The game was remade so many times it literally died, had all its capital stolen, got its IP bought out, and finally arrived to players decades later as a forgettable game.

 

[TheInternetIsForThis]

I hope it won't become a pattern with every new major Release of Unreal Engine though - because then the Game will never evolve past the point we know it in UE4 right now and will become like an "infinite Cash-Cow" - eating just as much cash to develop every new Unreal Engine Version to the point we already know...

That's a really weird thing to say, you know? Epic follows a derivative of semver, which means that so long as the 5 is still a 5, upgrading to new releases will have minimal impact on the majority of game projects. UE4 ended at 4.27, which is twenty seven different updates to UE4 that you probably never heard about developers upgrading to.

The shortest timeframe between major versions of unreal engine was four years, with the changeover from UE1 to UE2 in 2002 after UE1's initial versions in '98. Every major version since then has been longer, with UE3 taking five years to develop and UE4 taking seven. UE4 came out in 2014, and enjoyed eight years of development prior to the release of UE5 in 2022, the longest thus far. That eight year period is a major contributor to this ongoing perspective about UE5, because a lot of people are literally too young to remember the last time it happened to developers. (Not to mention the last time it happened to developers was when it was purely a professional tool that was inaccessible to indie devs, so the changeover was industry-internal)

Going by that pattern, UE6 will happen sometime around 2030. If this game is still in development seven years from now, changing to a new version of unreal engine would be the least of their worries.

This game's developers looked into UE5 last year, while UE4 was still officially supported, and began the changeover process in the background while continuing to offer new content on UE4 in the interim. They probably looked into 5.0 too, but they only began the changeover with 5.1 after some significant issues with 5.0 had been resolved. After a while of that they asked the subscribers (the people actually giving them paychecks) about continuing the slow background development on UE5, or putting it at the forefront in order to get it out the door faster. The overwhelming vote was in favor of pushing UE5 faster, which led to where we are.

And it's not like they have a choice on the matter at this point. You're going to see a lot more actively in development projects switching from UE4 to UE5 in the near future, because lack of official support for UE4 means a lot more than no bugfixing from epic. It means the community of developers who make assets and tools for UE4 are moving on and stopping support for the UE4 versions of their projects. It also means the community of developers and players with tons of knowledge about how to use UE4 is fracturing and much of that knowledge is moving on to UE5. Anyone who stays on UE4 while actively developing a game is acknowleding that they are going to be on their own as a developer, more so as time goes on and existing tutorials and guides start vanishing due to pages and accounts going offline.

 

[JustAl]

That's all very true TheInternetIsForThis. I was hasty in my previous post and speaking more about game projects individually than the Unreal engine. I think the Carnal Instinct devs are more talented and prepared than many dev teams of their kind, but they really have to stop and acknowledge core mechanics for a moment before they stack on more quests and NPCs. With the expectation that UE6 won't come until 2030 it's not likely we'll have another DNF moment where this game's engine changes like 3 times then dies. Although recently I've found another game project on F95 hopping from UE4 to UE5 to Unity so... yikes.

 

[TheInternetIsForThis]

That's all very true TheInternetIsForThis. I was hasty in my previous post and speaking more about game projects individually than the Unreal engine. I think the Carnal Instinct devs are more talented and prepared than many dev teams of their kind, but they really have to stop and acknowledge core mechanics for a moment before they stack on more quests and NPCs. With the expectation that UE6 won't come until 2030 it's not likely we'll have another DNF moment where this game's engine changes like 3 times then dies. Although recently I've found another game project on F95 hopping from UE4 to UE5 to Unity so... yikes.

Unfortunately, this game's update history implies that game mechanics and playtesting are not really their strong suit. Most of the issues that come up with updates correlate with things that a dedicated programmer would normally handle. Art, animation, map design, and sound are all things they clearly have someone in-house to work on. Less so for programming, scene logic, and quest logic.

All that said, the game has improved tremendously on that front compared to the initial builds. The original combat system was incredibly bad, as was the original quest and save handling. Annoying and error-prone as the current iterations are, it does seem to developers are willing and able to learn and update things.

 

[panaeon]

That's a really weird thing to say, you know? Epic follows a derivative of semver, which means that so long as the 5 is still a 5, upgrading to new releases will have minimal impact on the majority of game projects. UE4 ended at 4.27, which is twenty seven different updates to UE4 that you probably never heard about developers upgrading to.

The shortest timeframe between major versions of unreal engine was four years, with the changeover from UE1 to UE2 in 2002 after UE1's initial versions in '98. Every major version since then has been longer, with UE3 taking five years to develop and UE4 taking seven. UE4 came out in 2014, and enjoyed eight years of development prior to the release of UE5 in 2022, the longest thus far. That eight year period is a major contributor to this ongoing perspective about UE5, because a lot of people are literally too young to remember the last time it happened to developers. (Not to mention the last time it happened to developers was when it was purely a professional tool that was inaccessible to indie devs, so the changeover was industry-internal)

Going by that pattern, UE6 will happen sometime around 2030. If this game is still in development seven years from now, changing to a new version of unreal engine would be the least of their worries.

This game's developers looked into UE5 last year, while UE4 was still officially supported, and began the changeover process in the background while continuing to offer new content on UE4 in the interim. They probably looked into 5.0 too, but they only began the changeover with 5.1 after some significant issues with 5.0 had been resolved. After a while of that they asked the subscribers (the people actually giving them paychecks) about continuing the slow background development on UE5, or putting it at the forefront in order to get it out the door faster. The overwhelming vote was in favor of pushing UE5 faster, which led to where we are.

And it's not like they have a choice on the matter at this point. You're going to see a lot more actively in development projects switching from UE4 to UE5 in the near future, because lack of official support for UE4 means a lot more than no bugfixing from epic. It means the community of developers who make assets and tools for UE4 are moving on and stopping support for the UE4 versions of their projects. It also means the community of developers and players with tons of knowledge about how to use UE4 is fracturing and much of that knowledge is moving on to UE5. Anyone who stays on UE4 while actively developing a game is acknowleding that they are going to be on their own as a developer, more so as time goes on and existing tutorials and guides start vanishing due to pages and accounts going offline.

I do understand that it's necessary to change to the newest version, but it's not weird in any way since people are probably supporting the Game financially, too (Patreon etc.) and I think it would be nice to see a roughly outlined (so, not legally binding or anything) timeline, that can be laid-out and followed with a margin of error, that is natural for unexpected Events to happen along the line - and adjusted accordingly when these "unexpected events" happen, of course. That's just how everything in Life works, isn't it?

And since it's not an exceptionally big team either, I think the switch from one version to the next of the same platform obviously means some things can be built upon incrementally, but others need to be entirely re-made.
Even though I do not know the exact extent of either (Transparency of the Development Process could mend this naturally, but might deter some people as much as it builds trust in others, so that is another factor, that cannot be predicted with certainty because it depends on the individual human being).

So, I wonder if anyone knows for sure what the ease and challenges are from switching to the next version - how much of the development so far can be ported-over, for example, and how much needs to be re-done/-made/-created from scratch?
Because that could give better impression and estimation of it without revealing any "corporate secrets", i.m.h.o.

But communication is the key again to trust in any project in development - and, as in everything, there's always a risk involved of not estimating the audience correctly and having it lose faith and move away their support as a consequence.

I hope this will not happen with Carnal Instinct and because I care, I have brought this up in the hopes of "inspiring" some more Transparency and maybe better communication. Because "just the others don't do it" seems like a bad idea, considering the conditions many Gaming Companies "hold" their Coders in so far (which I hope will also get unionized, btw., so they can have Lives again and a living wage under far more humane circumstances - because coding is work like any other one. And valuable one at that...since we all benefit from the outcomes, after all).

Cheers and hope this clarifies my point a little better...I do wish the Game to succeed after all. But, without enough information in communicating during the Development Process, there's a risk of supporters losing faith. And I wish with all my heart, that this will be addressed and mitigated smartly and without deception like some scam-projects have done in the past, as we all know.

So, transparent communication nurtures trust - sketchy catch phrases don't. That's why I wish to have some rough outlines with the awareness and reminder of margins of error in the communication of the state of the development. Estimations are even alright, too. But it shouldn't put developers and especially the creative departments under distress either, since that is highly detrimental to any kind of Creative Process, too, I am well-aware. And that's the balancing act of every leaders in charge of every project everywhere on the Planet, i.m.h.o.

 

[TheInternetIsForThis]

I do understand that it's necessary to change to the newest version, but it's not weird in any way since people are probably supporting the Game financially

It is weird to say, because your statement that this could be a trend assumes that this game will still be in development seven to eight years from now when the next major version of Unreal Engine would be expected to come out. Minor versions of Unreal have little to no impact on game developers, which is why they are minor versions (e.g. 5.1 versus 5.3) instead of major versions. As I said earlier, there were twenty seven different updates to UE4 that were released over its eight year lifespan, that never prompted anything even remotely resembling the same issue that a major version causes.

Anything beyond that is just justifying a pessimistic viewpoint using a theoretical situation that is most of decade in the future. As for your prompts about transparency in communication, you really should just pull up their

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. They have been posting regular updates and polls about the game since before it launched, and tend to be rather open about the development status of various thing.

They attempted roadmaps in the past too, but those fell through when polling indicated very clearly that their subscribers had extremely different preferences in what to implement first, which caused a significant reshuffling of priorities.

At this point we are absolutely in the "wait and see" phase. Once the developers manage to drop a content update for the UE5 version, we'll be able to start gauging development speed properly for the first time since work started on the UE5 version over a year ago. Before that, all we can do is make assumptions about pacing and plans.